Hurt
by sdbubbles
Summary: "What have I become? My sweetest friend; everyone I know goes away; in the end; and you could have it all; my empire of dirt; I will let you down; I will make you hurt." - 'Hurt' by Johnny Cash.


**A/N: I don't really know why I wrote this, but I hope it makes some sense; my head is a bit of a mess at the moment, unfortunately.**

**This song is "Hurt" by Johnny Cash.**

**Sarah x**

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_I hurt myself today  
To see if I still feel  
I focus on the pain  
The only thing that's real  
The needle tears a hole  
The old familiar sting  
Try to kill it all away  
But I remember everything_

As she stared down at her pale white skin, paler than it had ever been before, she saw where a tiny plaster was stuck. In the numbness she had pressed a needle into her veins, drawing blood only to discover if she was still capable of feeling the sting of a needle. Today she had needed to know if her harsh view of this planet was down to being tough or whether it was down to being desensitised by her own life. She knew the feeling. She could remember it. But she had needed to know she could actually feel, so she had caused herself to feel pain, the easiest thing on the planet to feel and the most torturous to endure. If she hadn't felt the sting of that needle, then he was right, and their daughter was better off without her.

But she had felt it.

It was the only thing she knew, to feel pain. Even joy was tainted with pain. She saw that more now than ever before. Pain was everywhere, and if she wasn't careful, it had the potential to numb her of everything. Even the birth of her daughter was had been contaminated by the pain, the fear, that she would not live on this Earth very long, that she would have been taken away as quickly as she was given.

She stood up and slowly paced through the house to her daughter, to the nursery of pale pink and affection the world assumed she did not possess. She tried to banish the words others said to her but it never worked. It was building up now to the point of excruciating pain, simply because she could remember it all. From childhood to motherhood she had endured whatever was thrown at her because she was a survivor.

She not only survived, but she also built a life. Alone she may have been but she wasn't in the gutter either. So many of the children she had grown up around would have ended up with lives of a struggle, but she wanted for nothing material, and she made sure her daughter never had to either. But the loneliness was its own struggle. She had her work and her words and her girl, but there wasn't much else. And if the Earth and moon conspired against her, her girl wasn't going to be hers longer.

She had long given up on trying to forget her own childhood. Her mother had abandoned her, left her to fend for herself. She tried to forget but the memory lingered, and she knew all she could do was make sure she never abandoned her own daughter like her mother abandoned her. To do that, she had to feel nothing but hurt at the hands she loved even now, even after all their mistakes. She had to be able to feel to do this, or what was she worth to the child she was fighting to keep?

She stopped shutting it out. She remembered so she knew what not to do.

_What have I become?__  
__My sweetest friend__  
__Everyone I know goes away__  
__In the end__  
__And you could have it all__  
__My empire of dirt__  
__I will let you down__  
__I will make you hurt_

She leaned over the cot and traced her baby's arm. "What have I turned into?" she whispered to her daughter. "My beautiful girl, what has your mother turned into?" She had never been soft but she had always been able to see where she went off track, where she was right and where she was wrong. Was he right? Was their daughter to become a mini version of her? Cold and tough, but always hurting?

She didn't want the little girl to grow up like her mother; she had lost most people she had ever loved, or even tried to love. They all left her. They either hated her guts or they couldn't cope, or they had the offer of a better life – one that didn't involve her. In the end, she had no-one but the child before her. Everything, everybody, else had vanished into thin air.

The love she had known once had been ripped from her in so many different ways; she hadn't realised the world had such creativity in how to cause human beings pain. Despite her front, she was terrified of the thought of this world changing the innocent child she had given birth to.

Everything she had, she had given to her daughter, but even that didn't seem to be enough anymore. Everything she knew, she had built on what her own mother had left her with. She had been left with nothing but the pain of being kicked to the dirt, abandoned with no explanation, or even a goodbye. She didn't want to pass that kind of life on. She didn't want to desert her daughter because she knew what it was to grow up as a motherless child.

But she couldn't help but fear that she was going to fail her daughter in another way. She couldn't help but wonder how long it was going to take before she started to cause her own child unintentional pain.

_I wear this crown of thorns__  
__Upon my liar's chair__  
__Full of broken thoughts__  
__I cannot repair__  
__Beneath the stains of time__  
__The feelings disappea__r__  
__You are someone else__  
__I am still right here_

She had once told herself she would retain all rationality when it came to motherhood, that she would know her limits and know where that line was drawn, but faced with the prospect of losing her, all that went out of the window. For her daughter, she suffered the blow of being labelled an unfit mother; she suffered all the grief-fuelled cruelty thrown at her. She knew he wasn't thinking straight, that all this, the custody battle and the pure anger, stemmed from a brutal death and the pain it caused for him.

But regardless of the root of the problem, it's the possibilities ahead she was fighting. She wasn't fighting him. She was fighting his actions. She had no idea why she still loved him, but she did, and now she suffered for it.

She didn't want her daughter to suffer with her, and though she was still too young to know what was going on, she had a fear that their girl knew her parents were at war. She didn't want that. "I will take the blows," she reassured the tiny being under her gentle fingers. "You never have to worry about that. But know this, my love. Know that your father loves you. That's why he's fighting me. He's fighting me for you, but he's wrong. You won't be like me. I'll make sure of it."

He was right in that to have their child like her mother and her grandmother before her was an outcome they had to avoid. But she had learned over time where her own mother had gone wrong, and where she had to diverge her actions from those taken all those years ago. Time had taught her how to survive, even if it had to be without spirit at times.

Here and now, as she planned her battle strategy, she was fuelled by logic rather than the feeling she feared she should have in her when she declared war. She had seen a road ahead of her with obstacles that had to be overcome, but nothing to feel in between. It was calculated and cold. The battle for their daughter ceased to be emotional. It had become a battle of wit and strategy when it should have been an act of love for both parents.

Why couldn't he see he was destroying what little they had managed to salvage? He wasn't the man she fell in love with. He had gone off the rails in an enormous and terrifying way, becoming the loving shell of a man filled with hatred. He wasn't even close to the man she remembered. The man who had laughed her through hardship and loved her through grief was gone, replaced by an angry, mourning, terrified man. They only shared one fear – that they would always be alone.

But it was her who stood at their baby's cot, trying not to cry as the scale of the disaster hit her.

_What have I become?  
My sweetest friend  
Everyone I know goes away  
In the end  
And you could have it all  
My empire of dirt  
I will let you down  
I will make you hurt_

"You're all I have," she admitted, the tip of her finger stroking her smiling baby's cheek. "But I don't want you to be what I've become. I can't do that to you."

The wave of pain hit her, washing her over until it was all she could feel, and her tears could not be held back any longer. She didn't normally cry, but this was a catastrophe for her. It was a mess. She had lost anyone else who had ever loved her. She looked into her daughter's eyes and saw adoration and unconditional love, something she could not lose. After swearing to herself she never would have become a mother, here she wept over the prospect of losing the child whose mother she was.

"I would give you everything," she cried into the cot. She saw her tears fall down, staining the white blanket that wriggled with the child under it. "You can have all I am, everything I can give you, but I can't promise it's any good to you." The baby smiled and she had to return it, beaming as she cried her heart out to her baby girl. "I love you more than I've ever loved anything. You have everything I am."

The child caught her finger in her tiny hands and held it with a happy gaze. "I don't know what you're smiling for," she tearfully scolded. "Your daddy's right. I will let you down. I will make you hurt."

But the smile remained and she had to share it as she wept over her baby. She knew she would occasionally stumble. She was only human. It was bound to happen. She was bound to fail her daughter sometimes, but it didn't mean she didn't love her, or that she was unfit to be a mother. It meant she possessed the humanity she was accused of lacking.

_If I could start again__  
__A million miles away__  
__I would keep myself__  
__I would find a way_

"If I could go back in time, I never would have let your father go," she whispered. "Because he wasn't always like this. He used to be so happy, so easy to love. But I will fight for you, because I love you both."

Even as she said it, all the memories flashed through her head. All her many mistakes haunted her, and she wished she had kept herself in check, that she had acted on what she knew was right and what she knew was wrong. She wasn't entirely to fault but there was no denying some of the blame lay at her feet. She wasn't perfect herself.

But had she been able to go back, she would have found a way to make it all different. She would have found a way to be what she had always wanted to be, and what she was never going to be. All she could do now was make sure her, their, daughter was everything she wasn't. All she could do was instil in her child all the little good she had in her, and sway her away from all the failings she knew lay within her.

She would find a way to prove him wrong, no matter how much it hurt.

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**Hope this is OK!  
Please feel free to leave me a review and tell me your thoughts!  
Sarah x**


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